BOOM.

Whoa what was that. Orion runs toward the boom with a piece of toast still in his mouth.

There is a fourteen-year-old girl standing in front of the remains of an exploded mal and cackling madly. 

Oh, okay, cool, nobody to save and nothing to kill. "Gratz."

"Thank you!" she beams, and then runs off to find something else. 

Awww she's just like him when he was that age.

...that's also a new feeling! He's sure having several of those lately.

Kareen gets through breakfast and takes a nap and updates her parents on the situation. Papa is, predictably, sorrowfully sympathetic about Arjun Sharma, and Dad is, predictably, intrigued by the idea of a device for perceiving people undergoing horrible suffering, and Papa is, predictably, affectionately exasperated.

Kareen loves both of her fathers very much and is extremely glad that neither of them is suffering horribly inside an awful blob monster whose sole virtue is having too many eyes.

And then there is study group, and lunch, and meeting up with Aadhya again to continue work on the diamond.

"Somebody took the Orion Lake special, huh?"

“Indeed. Interesting kid.”

"She seems to be having fun with it. ...do you know if it'll pass on to kids?"

“My intuition says yes but I didn’t get around to asking the notebook about that so I don’t know for sure.”

"...I want it."

Boop!

"Is it hard to learn to do?"

“Oh, no, it’s incredibly intuitive.”

Bounce bounce.

And working on the diamond. Kareen is learning more about artificing but still isn’t able to contribute much besides talking to it. And the materials Aadhya specified, of course.

Aadhya chats with the diamond about how it will get to meet and help its users meet so many people in such (an apparently exciting variety of) dire straits to triangulate them, and get their urgent messages out even before they can be rescued, and to bring them words of comfort, and blah blah blah, while she makes it a setting in a mirror frame and melts down construct mal metal and silver to form the reflective surface. And finally the diamond can be placed in the tension setting, and poemed into staying there nicely.

“It’s beautiful.”

"Thank you." She hands it to Kareen.

And Kareen gazes into the mirror and…

No. Wait.

“Probably I shouldn’t use this in front of other people, at least at first.”

"Okay. In your pocket dimension maybe?"

Nod nod.

And she transfers it inside, and gazes into it.

“Arjun Sharma.”

The mirror shows brown eyes, just like El's, pupils down to pinpoints, saccades fearful and trembling.

But the voice that comes out of the mirror is coherent, and what it says is:

"Tell my grandmother I win."

“Okay. I will do that. What do you win at?”